Pirates (of the Spanish Main et al.)

Pirates -- there have been several iterations now, starting with Pirates of the Spanish Main, with Pirates: Rise of the Fiends being the latest -- is a trading card game. Sorta kind. Or it's a miniatures game in which you don't have to paint the damn miniatures, which is what always stopped me from being a miniatures gamer. Any how you look at it, though, it's a damn clever little thing, and given how kitschy pirates are in general, it's amazing it's been a commercial success. I mean, Wizkids has gone through 10 expansions from the originals now, they actually ran TV commercials for the damn thing, and you can find it at Walmart -- I have to assume it's a commercial success.

Pirates is sold in little mylar envelopes that look exactly like trading-card booster packs. When you open one up, however, you find that the "cards" are in fact die-cut plastic. Most of the cards in a pack are pieces of ships -- a ship is between one and three cards; with two, there might be one with pieces you assemble to form the ship body, and one the mast and sails. This is the pure physical joy of the game, in fact; punching out the pieces, and figuring out how to bend and assemble your sailing ships. The engineering is clever; there's enough flex in the plastic, and they're assembled in a well-planned way, so that the tension of the plastic holds them together effectively. And they look pretty darned good, sitting on your tabletop. And when you disassemble your ships, the pieces snap easily back into the plastic cards they came from for storage. Just a beautiful bit of toy design, really.

A pack also comes with an island card, some treasures (circular punchouts from a plastic card), a rules booklet set in type that even if you aren't my age you probably need glasses to read it, and the tiniest goddamn die I've ever seen in my life. There's a "crew" person as well. To play a game, you set a number of "points" each player may spend, on ships and crew; each assembles that number of points worth of ships and crew, from among all cards he owns (the TCG element comes in here--there's always an incentive to buy more cards to have more variety to choose from). Some agreed number of islands are distributed across the table, and some number of treasures are chosen, mixed at random, and placed on the islands.

The goal is to get a majority of the total treasure value back to your island. During your turn, you can move, attack, explore, or repair. Ships are rated either as having "L" movement or "S" movement, meaning they can move as far as the long side of a card in a turn, or as far as a short side. Each "mast" has an attack; one ship card gives a numerical rating for each of the ship's masts, and you must roll higher than that rating to hit an opponent. A "hit" dismasts one mast of an opposing ship, though repairs can remount it.

Some ships, some treasures, and all crew members have special abilities, printed on their cards that, Magic-like, modify or supplant the basic rules of the game.

That's about all there is to it, and when you come down to it, it's mild fun, viewed purely as game qua game. As a simulation of naval combat in the age of sail, it is, of course, completely and wholly absurd; there is no wind direction, the weather gauge is utterly unimportant and not even a game concept, and about the only element of naval tactics from the actual era that the game represents is "crossing the T" (you can't fire through your own masts or sails, so that a ship that has crossed the enemy's T can bring all its "masts" to bear, while the opponent can fire only the foremast... Not that masts are what fire on a sailing ship, you understand, but whatever).

And yet there's a sheer tactical pleasure to assembling your little ships and shoving them about the tabletop, doubtless bellowing such pleasantries as "Shiver me timbers!" and "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"

Pirates is not what you'd call a great game -- and yet, as a design artifact, as a mass-audience way of combining the pleasures of building ship models, obsessing over the virtues of different cards in a TCG, and a simplistic game of naval miniatures combat, it displays enormous imagination and skillful mechanical as well as game design.

It's designed by Jordy Weisman -- yes, he of Battletech, MechWarrior, and HeroClix; and ARG pioneer (AI, The Beast). Founder of FASA, 42 Entertainment, and Smith and Tinker. The man has too much talent. Someone should shoot him, I think.

N.B.: Sony Online Entertainment also has a online version; I haven't played it, so I can't really comment, but thought it worth a mention. I'll note though that what appeals to me about the tabletop game is its clever mechanical design and tactile nature -- it's not something that makes me want to search out a version for online play.